Archive

After writing a positive review of Roy's Hawaiian Grill on Yelp, Matt Siltala received a "thank you" from the company. It's that kind of active involvement with Yelp that Avalaunch Media President Siltala recommends to his clients. "I love Roy's Hawaiian Grill because it's done that for me," Siltala...

Salesforce.com has debuted a new feature for its Salesforce Desk.com Support Center: video support for knowledge-based self-service offerings. Desk.com Video Support Center allows users to embed video content from any of the major video platforms in their online customer service offerings. There is ...

It was just six months ago that we saw what beacon technology could do on a wide scale. For Super Bowl XLVIII, the National Football League installed wireless transmitters in Times Square and at MetLife Stadium to send simple yet specific messages to smartphones: "bathrooms to the right," "snacks to...

Take a look at almost any sales software on the market, and you'll find the vendor's claim that the product accelerates the sales process. It's a given. For years, we've been trying to achieve this acceleration, and we've been succeeding. The only problem with this approach is that it can't go on fo...

Qstream, which has developed a gamification-based app to help sales reps learn complex sales-related content, has broadened and deepened its functionality so the platform can be used in a number of new scenarios. It has expanded the types of situations in which a company can use its Qstream license,...

Online reviews are a modern-day fact of life for any company operating in the hospitality industry, but an Internet maelstrom erupted on Monday when one hotel's surprising response to that reality was brought to light. Namely, the Union Street Guest House in upstate New York threatened to charge tho...

I was impressed by the announcement by Salesforce.com last week of a new product combination it calls "Sales Reach." It's supposed to be a mashup of sorts between Sales Cloud, Pardot and Communities functionality that helps reps run micro-campaigns, perform nurturing and develop communities. As some...

As Amazon's Fire Phone finds its way into consumers' hands, brick-and-mortar retailers are on guard. Amazon's new device is equipped with technology that seems to have been designed to take showrooming to new heights -- or depths, depending on one's perspective. The Fire Phone, in brief, has functio...

Tellwise, a two-and-a-half year old startup, has introduced a new collaboration platform for sales reps to target prospects. Called "Smart Messages," the multichannel platform comes equipped with such tools as intelligent notifications, behavioral analytics and mobile functionality. Smart Messages i...

Your company has a CRM system that employees love and use regularly, and marketing automation tools to help streamline and automate all of your online marketing activities. That's a great start, but did you know that most marketing qualified leads -- more than 94 percent by some estimates -- don't c...

So far, Satya Nadella's moves as head of Microsoft echo the teachings of Jim Collins' 2001 best seller, Good to Great. It's a book about how and why some companies wallow in mediocrity and others operate at several levels of magnitude higher than their peers -- think Apple for one and Salesforce for...

Attentive.ly recently released its application on the Eloqua platform, digging a deeper foothold for itself in the CRM enterprise space. Attentive.ly provides social marketing automation functionality in the form of a plug-and-play toolset that works with a CRM overlay. Using its tools, companies ...

SAP and its long-standing partner Esri have developed a native product integration that debuted this week at the at the Esri User Conference currently under way in San Diego. The companies have been collaborating on projects since 1999, due to the significant overlap in their respective customer bas...

It's general practice to have multiple sales forecasts, and that typically means low and upside potential as well as what's committed -- but the idea of teasing those threads apart only at forecasting time might be old school and no longer applicable. Long before you compile a forecast, you have a g...

Salesforce.com will shell out $350 million in common stock for RelateIQ in a deal expected to close by October. It will provide another $40 million dollars in stock for its cash balance. RelateIQ will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Salesforce, according to an SEC filing. Many of Salesforce's pa...